User account menu

Tempo

Tempo

MURAL: Tempo is a 3CD box set recorded live during a 4-hour performance at the Rothko Chapel in 2013. Following up on the group's Live at the Rothko Chapel from 2011, this release shows the group expanding into a much longer form. MURAL consists of Australian windplayer Jim Denley, with Norwegians Kim Myhr (guitar) and Ingar Zach (percussion). They first performed in 2007 in Madrid, and have made concerts around the world since. The trio has released two critically acclaimed records.

After two successful concerts at the Rothko Chapel and a CD-release on the Chapel's own publications, the trio visited the chapel in Houston, Texas for the third time in April 2013. Wishing to challenge traditional concert formats, they decided to play a four hour long performance in the chapel. The result was so satisfying to them that they decided to release the music as a 3CD-box set. The music that was played in the chapel is an expansive and patient form of music, far beyond any traditional entertainment formats. In an abyss of time, MURAL's music was not only elevated to another level; one could say that in these long durations, it finally came to its own right. Rothko's paintings from the Rothko Chapel can be seen on the front cover of the release.

There's a split second at the outset of any form of improvisation, musical or otherwise, in which you can feel space breathe. There may be a division of performers and audience, but at this glimmering inception point it may suddenly be hard to tell any differences between us. All (or few) are gathered here to create some new being, a gestalt formed through our combined force of will remaining resolutely pertinent to the place in which this new configuration shall occur. I've stood in vast smooth-walled white cubes with a handful of strangers and huddled in tiny sweaty-stoned basements with a crowd of friends as we wait for the right moment to begin. Always there has been the sudden feeling, as though this bedroom or rural glade, conference centre antechamber or squalid art pit were sizing us all up. «Now that you're all gathered here», the space demands to know, «what do you think you're going to do?».

That fleeting enjoined challenge of space and people that occurs at these moments has always seemed to me the most important occurrence throughout the performance that will follow. A myriad of possibilities are open to us; we may collectively become blissfully dazed wanderers in the fourth dimension, we may have a quick blast of inspiration followed by aching minutes of weariness and torpor or we may just drift away from each other fuelled by dismay and disappointment at squandered opportunities.

Which is why I struggle with the fact that this remarkable three-disc improv set by the Mural trio of Jim Denley, Kim Myhr and Ingar Zach cuts out the first quarter of what was originally a four-hour performance. As the first disc's 'Second Hour' yawns open, percussive and string drones usher the listener in before sparks of saxophone shards toot and squall like low gliding gulls. A cough, the sounds of footsteps and we are away. At least, on record and in the form of Tempo that is. Had you actually been present in Houston's Rothko Chapel on 27 April 2013, you would almost certainly have a different response to this point of the performance. Perhaps in the flesh we would encounter Mural in a transition phase following an opening hour of aimless diversions and dead ends. No explanation is given for that missing hour and so it feels like a potentially crucial chapter ripped from a novel or a panel necessarily discarded in order to craft a perfectly formed triptych.

Sleeve notes by Mural proclaim Tempo to be all «one moment», and so any much-rehearsed debate as to whether improvised music can ever be adequately documented may simply be cast aside by the fact that perhaps that first hour wasn't of the same moment as what follows. What you hear on Tempo is the use of space and presence within the Rothko Chapel and how Mural are able to place us within the same context in which they performed that day. Any audience or visitors during Mural's afternoon there were seemingly encouraged to interact however they desired, whether pulling up a chair in order to immerse themselves completely within the experience or forced to tolerate another part of the environmental make-up as they contemplated the darkly glowering canvases.

The overwhelming impression one takes from Tempo is that the convergence of place, performers, presence and sound have brought into being a new space, entirely unique and unrepeatable. Perhaps it is that very absence of the first hour that has helped form this space. Tempo in its own right is a grand recorded work in which the listener should amble and drift, feeling the breath and pulse of Mural's music as it glides into minutes of meditative silence or erupts into flurries of wind, string and steel. It's the sound of your heartbeat and blood rushing through your body as you stand silently within an austere place of much-needed retreat. The thunderstorm which breaks midway through 'Third Hour' only emphasises further this sense of refuge within a brooding sanctuary set apart from your own external troubles and trials.

Despite running to three discs and almost as many hours, Mural's Tempo is more immediate, with moments of tension and release among its long, contemplative passages. Drawn from a four hour performance at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, Tempo brings together reedist Jim Denley, 12-string guitar and zither player Kim Myhr and percussionist Ingar Zach. We enter at the start of the second hour, the musicians having established their terms. There are occasional lapses into over-familiar free-improv tropes, but for the large part, this is an original and affecting performance, with the musicians' individual voices blending into a unified whole. Denley conjures sussurus tones and controlled feedback moans while Ingar Zach is a highly inventive presence on percussion. Rubbing and tapping a mallet against the skin, he coaxes low resonant tones and squeaks from his gran cass (bass drum), occasionally laying a far-away pulse under Myhr's gossamer string textures. The fourth element in the piece – Mark Rothko's paintings – may be absent to home listeners, but Tempo is a vivid and compelling artwork in its own right.

The most significant thing about Tempo is that it was recorded live in concert at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. This octagonal space (pictured on the album cover, right) opened in 1971, a year after Mark Rothko's death. It is sparsely furnished and painted white, with fourteen of Rothko's late works—large black canvasses—displayed around its walls. All of this gives the chapel a unique ambience that is conducive to quiet contemplation, if not prayer. It has inspired musicians ranging from Morton Feldman to Peter Gabriel («Fourteen Black Paintings» from Us). As well as a stream of visitors and pilgrims, the chapel frequently hosts music concerts and several live albums have been recorded there, including Keith Rowe's Concentration of the Stare (Bottrop-Boy, 2011). Rowe has said that «the room» can be as important as the musicians in shaping a performance. In this case, it deserves equal billing...

The history of Mural is bound up with that of the Rothko Chapel. The trio consists of Australian saxophonist and flautist Jim Denley plus two Norwegians, guitarist Kim Myhr and Spanish-resident percussionist Ingar Zach. The three first performed together in Madrid, in 2007, and have played around the world since then, releasing three previous albums. They have played live in the chapel on three separate occasions, the first and third of those resulting in the recordings Live at the Rothko Chapel (Rothko Chapel Publications, 2011), a single CD recorded in March 2010, and Tempo, recorded in April 2013. So, of four Mural album releases to date, two were recorded in the chapel.

The 2013 concert, preserved on Tempo, lasted for four hours and so the album is on a grander scale than its predecessor. Although it is a triple-CD set, as its track titles indicate, it does not document the entire concert just the last three hours, beginning with the track «Second Hour.» While the album as a whole makes three hours of enthralling listening, the tracks do not present a continuous record of the concert and each can be appreciated in its own right, in isolation from the others. As always with Mural, the contributions of the players fit together well, creating a full and varied sound with each of them clearly distinguishable. At opposite ends of the frequency spectrum, Myhr's strummed zither or 12-string guitar and Zach's gran cassa (bass drum) fill out the soundscape to good effect.

The duration of the concert, no doubt coupled with the chapel's atmosphere, had a noticeable effect on the trio's music. In most improvised music, the musicians can be heard responding to one another, resulting in rapid evolution. By comparison, the music here seems to work on a different timescale and to evolve far more slowly. All three players sound patient and relaxed, happy to take time over their explorations without undue haste. No-one is under any pressure because no-one is applying pressure. So, for instance, Denley frequently holds long notes, seeming to savour their sound in the space, while Myhr's strumming and Zach's percussion both serve to sustain and colour the ensemble sound. From the cohesive nature of their music, it is obvious that all three are aware of the others' contributions, but they all seem content to let things develop naturally with no-one obvious goading. The music does have clear peaks and troughs but they happen steadily over time, never sounding forced. The musicians deserve credit not only for fine musicianship but also for their powers of concentration and endurance. Bravo!

This music cannot be rushed but is best savoured at length. Despite lasting nearly three hours, when heard in its entirety it can make time feel irrelevant—in much the same way that time spent in the Rothko Chapel does. Listening to the album, it is easy to feel envious of the audience who were fortunate enough to be there in person on the night in question. For the rest of us, the recorded version feels as good as having been there.

Houston's pan-faith Rothko Chapel has inspired several musical works, notably Morton Feldman's piece of the same name. I visited the chapel in 1996, a magical experience I'll never forget. In the hour or so my girlfriend and I spent there, only one other person came in, and we were able to lose ourselves in the tranquility of the naturally lit space and the great, static, ineffable blocks of color.
All this amounts to an admission that I feel inexcusably proprietorial towards Rothko's last canvasses. My vision of how to represent/respond to them in sound is going to affect my reaction to anyone else's. Mural - Jim Denley (various wind instruments), Kim Myhr (12-string guitar, zither) and Ingar Zach (percussion) - have recorded there previously, and in 2011 they returned to play for four hours plus a coda, eventually omitting the first section from the recording.
They clearly love and respect the paintings, but sometimes their sonic reactions seem to busy, especially early on the first CD («Second hour»). And yet, concentrate on small areas of the canvasses and there is movement: flickering, unpredictable changes which Mural reflect. If I heard this performance out of context I'd thoroughly embrace it.
A compelling culmination, the third disc («Fourth Hour») begins with sparse, tentative, crystalline sounds. Soon, oceanic low register crecendi engulf you - just as those giant swathes of apparently monochromatic paint absorb you - until suddenly you are through to the other side, a serene world where you float alongside airy, gently pulsating tones, plaintive scratched string patterns and half-heard activity glimpsed in the corner of your ear.
Here, as elsewhere, Zach makes substantial, effective use of the gran cassa (a bass drum on which the vibrations of the head are electronically fed back, sustaining the sound and allowing control of decay rates and feedback), though his insistent throbbing on the second disc («Third hour») feels inappropriate. When that fades into the background, this piece, which opens with arresting, keening sax calls, is pervaded by mysterious brumous timbres, with fine work from Myhr. The coda evokes visions of a submerged landscape.

Rothko Chapel 1If I could be teleported anywhere in the world for just a couple of hours, I’d probably choose the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. It’s a little painful to think that I’ll probably never get to see the place that I wrote about here for the Guardian a few years ago, prompted by a performance in London of the piece Morton Feldman wrote in 1972, two years after his friend Mark Rothko’s death.

Feldman’s Rothko Chapel is fully reflective of its subject. You might even take it to be the last word. But then, five years ago, the improvising trio called Mural — Jim Denley (wind instruments), Kim Myhr (guitars, zithers, percussion) and Ingar Zach (percussion) — were given permission to record a performance inside the chapel, documenting a very different response to the space in a 50-minute piece called “Doom and Promise”.

They have returned a couple of times since then, and on April 27, 2013 they recorded an unbroken set of almost four hours, three quarters of which now appears on a three-CD set titled Tempo. Each disc is devoted to between 45 and 51 minutes of the set, omitting the first section of the performance.

Denley, who is from Australia, studied classical flute and began a long career in new music — playing many different wind instruments, with and without mouthpieces — after encountering the music of Evan Parker and Derek Bailey during a stay in London in 1975. Myhr is a Norwegian improvising guitarist who has written for the excellent Trondheim Jazz Orchestra. Zach, also Norwegian, is a member of Huntsville, one of my favourite bands.

The two and a half hours of Tempo provide an object lesson in free improvisation by musicians sensitive to each other and to their environment. There are no imperatives beyond the unhurried collective ravelling of sound in reaction to the space. Words to describe parts of it might include tinkling, buzzing, fluttering, booming, whirring, scraping, tolling. The individual contributions are not what this music is about, although Denley begins the second disc with a very striking saxophone passage involving simultaneous key-tapping and a shakuhachi-like bending of notes before the others join in for a close examination of tones and textures that achieves moments of great beauty. Indeed, if the second disc were issued in isolation, it might be considered a masterpiece of its kind; it’s something you could use to persuade a sceptic of the value of free improvisation, if you could get them to sit still and pay proper attention.

As with Rothko’s canvases, the meaning of this music lies in a land of the emotions beyond adequate verbal description. But if you like what AMM do, or the meditative solo percussion music Frank Perry used to make with his collection of gongs and bowls, then this might well be your thing, too. And since I’m probably never going to make it to Houston, it will have to do for me.

Mural are making Houston’s Rothko Chapel a regular home from home. The trio—Australian Jim Denley (wind instruments) and Norwegians Kim Myhr (guitar) and Ingar Zach (percussion)—had played two previous concerts there before the site-specific event that’s now documented on Tempo (the second yielded Mural’s 2011 album Live at the Rothko Chapel, which is available via rothkochapel.org).

Tempo (SOFA) was recorded in 2013, during a performance that lasted a full four hours. The album presents three long, uncut excerpts from the second, third and fourth hours, plus a 20 minute coda, on three CDs.

Given that the Chapel functions as a place of contemplation or non-denominational worship, the music isn’t as meditative as you might expect. The sound of the elements is occasionally audible as background noise, and what was evidently an overcast and windy day can only have enhanced the muted ambience of Rothko’s achromatic murals. So the atmosphere was pre-loaded, the sonic canvas already primed when the performance began.

The audience were free to enter, occupy the space and leave at will, so the performers could focus on the moment, yet there’s clearly a collective developmental logic at work here. Each of the three CDs works just fine in isolation, but the full set is engaging enough to make it tempting to stick around for the duration.

On the second disc (“Third Hour”), for example, the prevailing mood after eight minutes (established by gently strummed guitar, subtle spasms of gran casa or low-pitch bass drum, and breathy flute) is reprised a full fifteen minutes later. In the interim, thrumming tintinnabulation creates a brightness that slowly leeches away, to be supplanted by dolorous gong strikes and probing foghorn sax.

Percussionist Ingar Zach—best known for his work with Huntsville—combines beautifully with Jim Denley on “Third Hour”. Witness, about half an hour in, his swirls of brushed and rubbed gran casa skins melding with a burred saxophone sustain and circular breathing that amplifies Denley’s breath into a wind machine.

Press notes highlight Denley’s interest in exploring the saxophone’s “relevance to ancient and current traditions in Australian music”, as well as “innovative electronics and miking”. Straightforwardly tuneful playing is mostly held in reserve, in favour of soundings deep in the grain of the music’s texture. “Third Hour” begins with solo sax in short but keenly incised phrases, variations in embouchure testing the ply of the Chapel’s loaded ambience.

As for Kim Myhr, there’s no sign here of his musics for dance, nor for jazz orchestra, but there is plenty of evidence for his interests in American folk music and composers György Ligeti and Morton Feldman (another composer of music for the Rothko Chapel). Myhr ends the ambient intro to “Fourth Hour” (disc three, track one) with feather-light 12-string picks, the guitar sounding out cleanly at first, then enriched with bowl chimes and footsteps (the only noticeable audience intrusion on the whole set). Denly’s sax enters as mere breath sounds, but subtly fills out as Myhr’s guitar suggests a melody. Then sub-bass reverb from gong strikes turn the mood ominous, merging with Myhr’s now thrumming guitar into a deep drone.

This last movement of the main set features some of the album’s most dynamically eventful music. At 19:45 there’s only sax, plaintive but non-vocal, blending with high-pitch cymbal or Tibetan bowl scrapes, but then ringing like a twin bell alarm clock turns the atmosphere edgily static. At 26:00 it sounds like elementally raw weather has invaded the chapel. Brief irruptions of gran casa break the spell, and Denley’s sax probes percussive echoes while rain provides a backwash for delicate glints of zither and 12 string. Guitar picking then provides a holding fix for abstract sax, airy fluting and percussion improvisations. At this stage, everything is airy and delicate, even, perhaps, subtly playful.

The muted conclusion to the main set comes with a few minutes of pure ambience, then a crescendo of small sounds that end in sax licks that curl smokily into plumes suspended in silence. The 21 minute “Coda” that ends disc three flows naturally from there, beginning with harp-like zither and vocal percussion plus pianistic percussion trills and birdlike fluting. A marble or ball-bearing rolls and settles. A brief flurry of agitation yields a brief, rhythmic guitar figure and extended flurries of saxophonic contact sounds and circular breathing, taken down by zither glissandoes and lulling guitar.

Forthcoming on September 1st, 2015 on Norwegian Sofa Music imprint is «Tempo», the most recent 3-CD spanning album outing by Mural, an experimental trio consisting of Jim Denley, Kim Myhr and Ingar Zach which have recorded this box package throughout their third - originally four hours spanning - performance at the Rothko Chapel in Houston / Texas in April 2013. Meandering somewhat in between pure improvisation, super leftfield FreeJazz and droning, hypnotizing, live-created PostAmbient the three musicians take us on a journey through the whole spectrum from super buzzing, insectoid sounds to calm, dream-like guitar sequences reminiscing of early Balearic vibes, minimalistic drum vs glockenspiel parts, thrilling stakkatos beyond any imagination, musique noir, yearning and lonely wind section episodes as well as squealing, nerve-wrecking flutes, perilous drumming and much more, such as swelling crescendoes to be found on the last of the three discs, «Tempo» caters an intense listening experience beyond regular formats or categories to all fans of free-floating FreeJazz and advanced experimentalism. Nice.

This is a very long and fascinating journey into the deep nature of sound, with Jim Denley on wind instruments, Kim Myhr on twelve-string guitar and zither, and Ingar Zach on gran cassia and percussion.

The album gives on three CDs a good part of a four hour performance at the Rothko Chapel in 2013. The music is less murmuring that this review's title might suggest. The approach is minimalist in terms of instrumentation and pitch variation, but the trio evolves between fascinating quietness and violence, working with intensity, power and other dynamics at their disposal to create an absolutely unpredictable suite of sound. At times you think that Armageddon is near (play it full volume) followed by zen-like calm and sooting bell sounds. The inherent repetitiveness of their music's nature builds hypnotic tension that can easily be challenged by disturbingly human cries on the sax or ripped to pieces by majestic bangs on the gran cassia, creating maximal dramatic effects contrasted by more quiet moments that never drop the overall tension of the sound.

The three musicians are phenomenal at co-creation, improvising together and moving together in developing the dark and fragile atmospheres they build, an amazing feat that becomes more impressive the more you listen to it.

You could think that after three previous albums, the nature of their approach has been explored but that is definitely not th case. The fact to have now a triple-CD album, bringing us the last three hours of a four-hour concert is amazing. It was all performed in one piece, so it is sad indeed that we have to change the disc from time to time, but that's really a minor thing, and we obviously wish to have had the first hour too.

This music requires attentive listening, because a lot is taking place, making this a must-have for fans.

In April 2013, Denley, Myhr and Zach returned to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas for the third time. Surrounded by Rothko’s grey and blue monuments, in an atmosphere both memorial and stage, they improvised a four-hour shifting soundscape which, if nothing else, deserves some sort of endurance award. Almost three of those hours are presented here in a single continuous piece, split over three CDs, in an ambitious exploration of form, sound and space.

It’s contemplative, meditative and, in places, even tribal. An incantation or ritual that absorbs both any extraneous detail and the listener’s attention.

Listen to it loud to heighten the dynamic contrasts – the spikes of invocation, the brief pregnant silences. There’s a sense of the void, in all its terrible reality, from which it is impossible to look away.

It’s impossible to talk about the individual tracks – labelled Second Hour, Third Hour, etc. – because this is a single extended piece of improvisation, fragmented only by the restrictions of the CD format. Each disc continues where the previous one leaves off. As such, it’s an endlessly shifting series of moods, twisting and shifting back on themselves and time and light passes by. And time does some funny things if you really settle down and immerse yourself in this recording; it stretches, it quickens – there’s an alteration of the perceptions inherent in the act of listening to this performance.

So what’s occurring?

Myhr’s zither is a significant contributor to the often otherworldly atmosphere, ranging from delicate textures to rattling wirework, and along with some of Zach’s interjections with gong or what sounds like a Tibetan singing bowl, frequently adds a faintly Eastern hue. Mhyr’s guitarwork is similarly spectral and abstract, even providing a slight folk-ish edge with some of the repeated chords. Zach’s broad palette includes rhythmic brushing, industrial metallic scrapes and sudden impacts thumping like a zen roshi’s stick. Denley moans and wails, possibly like the winds of heaven, possibly like a soul in torment, probably both. The tight connection between the three results in a fluid yet sure sound sculpture.

For the full effect, you should of course listen to all three discs, end to end. It’s an ordeal, but in the ceremonial rite-of-passage sense and wholly worth it. Strange things happen. At this level of abstraction, the ear imposes familar sonic shapes: telephones appear to ring, locomotives seem to arrive, ancient radios are tuned in… but all the while, it’s simply wind, strings, percussion, spontaneity and a sureness of touch from all three participants that suggests nothing is happening by accident.

Houston’s Rothko Chapel—an austere room lit with natural light and dedicated to the display of fourteen of Mark Rothko’s late, subdued color field paintings—is a congenial site for improvised performances by the international trio Mural. The group, made up of Norwegian Kim Myhr on guitar; percussionist Ingar Zach, a Norwegian now living in Spain; and Australian Jim Denley on alto saxophone and flutes, has played there twice before the April 2013 date recorded and issued on this three-CD set. (A previous performance, from March 2010, was recorded and released in 2011 by the Rothko Chapel’s own publishing concern.)

Reflecting the immersive, contemplative atmosphere of the Chapel, Tempo captures the last three-quarters or so of Mural’s over four-hour-long continuous performance. Although each of the three discs can be listened to by itself, the music’s full effect and the group’s deftness at developing sonic textures over long cycles only becomes forcefully apparent when all three are heard in sequence during a single listening.

The release’s title says something essential about the music given not only its expansive duration but the way it sets out a concatenation of sound events coming into and going out of existence in time. Mural’s pacing and arrangement of sound into alternating fields and figures create a sense of musical time imagined as having been precipitated into a narrative sequence with all of its peaks and valleys, its alternations of episodes of activity and rest. Through subtle, largely timbral playing Mural collapses time into a single moment present in a low-frequency sound field extending in all directions; through more urgent, rhythmically driven sections—led by Myhr’s energetic pulse on guitar—the dynamic of time’s passage is made clear.

Throughout it all Myhr, Zach and Denley have an intuitive rapport that doesn’t lapse even over such a long period of playing. Zach’s bells, gongs, drums and pitched percussion are put to good coloristic use over the entire course of the performance; Denley’s sax and flutes can be plaintive, abrasive, abstract or voice-like as the moment requires. Myhr is a strong ensemble player who can, when needed, push the group with chordal ostinatos or an insistent, jangling strum just as easily has he can bind the music during its quieter passages